The Beta Situation
<i>This post was originally made by <b>skyjake</b> on the dengDevs blog. It was posted under the categories: Engine, Releases, Version 1.9, Version 2.0.</i>
It has been quiet on the Beta 6 front lately, and I thought it would be good to clarify the situation a bit. Going forward, I would like to start a more aggressive push toward Beta 7, which means getting the fundamentals of deng2 up and running. This will lay the necessary foundation for fixing all of the biggest problems present in Beta 6, namely the mess with multiplayer functionality, broken demos, game-side savegames, and the rigid definition language.
Consequently, I've updated the release date of Beta 6.9 to "1st half of 2010". In practice, if something critical comes up we will make an update, but barring that we will focus on Beta 7.
As to the status of the Beta 7 work, personally I'm going through jDoom and updating the handling of objects and other thinkers so that they use the primitives provided by deng2. DaniJ is looking at the handling of map data using deng2. Once this work is complete, we can start building the over-the-network map update mechanism (evolution of DMU), which will take care of communicating changes in map, object, thinker, and other game state between the server and the clients. Simultaneously, this work (serializing map data) will allow us to handle savegames and demos in a much more elegant way than before. The core of the new definition (i.e., script) language already exists — the next steps on that front are more related to deciding on how to organize the scripts that contain map objects/etc. definitions.
It has been quiet on the Beta 6 front lately, and I thought it would be good to clarify the situation a bit. Going forward, I would like to start a more aggressive push toward Beta 7, which means getting the fundamentals of deng2 up and running. This will lay the necessary foundation for fixing all of the biggest problems present in Beta 6, namely the mess with multiplayer functionality, broken demos, game-side savegames, and the rigid definition language.
Consequently, I've updated the release date of Beta 6.9 to "1st half of 2010". In practice, if something critical comes up we will make an update, but barring that we will focus on Beta 7.
As to the status of the Beta 7 work, personally I'm going through jDoom and updating the handling of objects and other thinkers so that they use the primitives provided by deng2. DaniJ is looking at the handling of map data using deng2. Once this work is complete, we can start building the over-the-network map update mechanism (evolution of DMU), which will take care of communicating changes in map, object, thinker, and other game state between the server and the clients. Simultaneously, this work (serializing map data) will allow us to handle savegames and demos in a much more elegant way than before. The core of the new definition (i.e., script) language already exists — the next steps on that front are more related to deciding on how to organize the scripts that contain map objects/etc. definitions.